The semiconductor industry has experienced rapid growth due to continuous improvements in the integration density of a variety of electronic components (e.g., transistors, diodes, resistors, capacitors, etc.). For the most part, this improvement in integration density has come from repeated reductions in minimum feature size, which allows more components to be integrated into a given area.
As transistor sizes decrease, the size of each feature decreases. In advance processing technologies, as the channel length of a transistor approaches the same order of magnitude as the depletion-layer widths, short-channel effect may appear, which may adversely affect the performance of the transistor. There is a need in the art for structures and processing methods that could accommodate the small feature sizes in advanced process technologies.